Terry McMillan is the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including two that have been adapted into acclaimed feature films: Waiting to Exhale—a watershed work in contemporary fiction about black women—and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, “a sexy handbook of self-realization” (The New Yorker). The recipient of the Essence Award for Excellence in Literature, McMillan is also the author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, Disappearing Acts, Getting to Happy, and her American Book Award-winning first novel, Mama. With signature exuberance, Who Asked You takes a bracing look at the burdens and blessings of family in a multi-racial Los Angeles neighborhood.

Jesmyn Ward amazed the literary world when she won the 2011 National Book Award for her second novel, Salvage the Bones, a “strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible” book (San Francisco Chronicle) that follows a pregnant teenage girl and her family in the Mississippi coastal backwoods in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and during the immediate aftermath of the storm. A Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Men We Reaped is a piercing memoir about five young men in her life lost to drug addiction, accidents, and suicide, and a shattering account of the overarching pressures of poverty and racism.